Psychology : A problem-solving approach / Donald McEwen Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, Donald McEwen, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (583 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York : Harper, 1961.

Summary:

"The objectives for the student in the first course in psychology, when they are made explicit, can be grouped for the most part under two headings: knowledge of content and skill in the use of this knowledge. The content of the first course includes the facts, concepts, principles, and methods which are considered important for the beginning student. The intellectual skills which many hope will be acquired in the first course are commonly described as reasoning or problem-solving skills, such as analyzing complex situations in terms of psychological concepts, applying psychological principles to new situations, identifying the assumptions in statements about behavior, detecting psychological fallacies, and making valid inferences from psychological data. Some of the policies followed in preparing a textbook as a means toward these objectives can be briefly outlined. In respect to content, the first course in psychology is fairly well standardized today, at least as well as most of the introductory courses in the college catalog. This book aims to teach the standard topics, as currently understood, but the differences in emphasis should be pointed out. Animal psychology, the history of the science, and schools of psychology receive little attention. Intellectual activities, language, and the personality of the normal adult are emphasized somewhat more than usual. There is no separate chapter on physiological psychology, but physiological concepts are introduced frequently throughout the book where they are most useful. Psychological statistics, likewise, does not have an isolated chapter, but quantitative concepts and methods are introduced in the text, the practice problems, and the classroom projects described in the Teacher's Manual. The aim is to give the student considerable elementary practice, so that by the end of the course he will be doing simple computations, interpreting percentile scores and correlation coefficients, and making quantitative inferences from tables and graphs with ease. In respect to the second objective, the development of skill in the application of psychological knowledge, this book makes use of the well-established principle that a large proportion of the student's time should be spent in an active problem-solving kind of study. Textbooks of psychological statistics follow this principle by using many practice problems, and the same strategy is followed in the present text. To implement this problem-solving approach to learning psychology and to develop the skills mentioned above, 820 diverse problems have been constructed and distributed throughout the book. Some, at the beginning, are easy fill-in items, intended to fixate partially learned concepts and to develop an active vocabulary. Some are common misconceptions to be evaluated. Others are harder, intended for practice in critical thinking and reasoning, including quantitative reasoning, about psychological problems. Many require the application of a principle to a new situation. These problems were written concurrently with the text and frequently serve to develop minor principles or corollaries after the major principle has been presented. The Teacher's Manual accompanying this text contains four types of teaching aids: answers to the practice problems; classroom projects, experiments, and demonstrations; a large supply of test items; and an inventory for collecting student opinions"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (Harper, viewed June 5, 2023).